


Lunar Eclipse

by wily_one24



Series: Phases of the Moon [4]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F, Stripper AU, an interlude of sorts, can it really be called stripper AU if there are no strippers?, emma under the sleeping curse, phases of the moon series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-21
Updated: 2016-05-21
Packaged: 2018-06-09 19:36:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6920281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wily_one24/pseuds/wily_one24
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It’s quiet.” Henry says eventually. “The clock didn’t sound.”</p><p>And when her eyes glance to see the time is four minutes past the hour without the town clock ringing loud and clear, Regina’s gag reflex threatens to revolt... Because she knows... She knows why time has stopped again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lunar Eclipse

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** I could not, with good conscience, call this a SQ fic when it has no Emma. Or, well, it does have Emma, it's just that she's unconscious due to the sleeping curse. Also, because of the unconsciousness, there is no stripping and no sex. 
> 
> **A/N:** Trust me, gentle reader, whether or not this is what you wanted, just... trust me.

***

They’re eating dinner when Regina’s stomach falls. 

Sitting at their table, she can almost pretend that everything is normal, that Henry hadn’t waited with an expectant expression as if someone else was coming to eat with them. That their conversation isn’t awkward and stilted and this time not because of Henry’s belief, but because of her own nervousness and guilt. 

The tine of her fork scrapes across her plate and Regina winces, sparing a look at her son to see if he’d noticed. 

But he’s not looking at her; his head is quirked to the side and he’s listening, intense, his own fork forgotten in his hand and dangling half way to his mouth. 

“Henry?” She asks, tremulous and wary and, honestly, she should know better. She should. “What’s wrong?”

He looks at her as if she’s dim witted for not knowing. 

“It’s quiet.” He says eventually. “The clock didn’t sound.”

And when her eyes glance to see the time is four minutes past the hour without the town clock ringing loud and clear, Regina’s gag reflex threatens to revolt. 

Because she knows. 

She knows why time has stopped again. 

***

The hospital is small. 

Their town is small and, stuck in time, hasn’t needed much of a hospital to begin with. But now Regina wishes nothing else but to redesign the curse to include state of the art facilities, teams of specialist doctors, and limitless funds. 

“Madam Mayor.” Dr Whale stands in front of her, slightly nervous, but buoyed by the diminutive woman behind him. “It’s… uh… it’s family only.”

Her brow arches. 

“Family?” The word slides out of her mouth as if it’s distasteful. “And who is family? As I recall, Ms Swan doesn’t _have_ any next of kin.”

Jerky and timid and still holding valiantly onto the last vestiges of the fight that had recently sprung up, Mary Margaret pushes forward. 

“I’m her roommate! I’m the only one she has, just because you slept…”

Their relationship, hers and Emma’s, for what it was worth had never been a secret. Perhaps she should have been more discreet, but it hadn’t seemed to matter at the time. The time when she had lost her mind. 

She steps forward, raising her chin to look down at the woman in front of her, and Mary Margaret the simpering fool does not disappoint as she steps back and deflates. 

“As you just so helpfully pointed out, Ms Blanchard, I am currently involved with the woman. Not to mention she does have family here, namely my son. He is her next of kin and, as his legal guardian, it falls on me to take responsibility for Ms Swan’s medical care.”

All three of them turn to look through the glass windows. 

To the bed and the figure lying still on top of it. 

Regina bites the tip of her tongue, trying not to visualise the body as animate, smiling, laughing, moaning underneath her, green eyes twinkling at her, angry voice yelling, but alive so very alive in anything Emma had chosen to do. 

“Now, if you don’t mind…”

Whale coughs softly, a smothered sound in the back of his throat. 

“Yes, well.” The clip board shuffles in his hand. “As it stands, the machines are the only thing keeping her alive. There are no independent signs of life; no heartbeat, no brainwaves, nothing. We _could_ keep her alive indefinitely like this, but… she’s a shell. It would be kinder to…”

Breathing in, Regina summons all the energy she has ever felt and stares him down. 

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence.” She can feel her nostrils flare. “You will keep her alive, whatever the cost. Forever, if you need to. Do you understand?”

He nods, disapproval hidden but clear behind the sympathy and the understanding in his eyes, and steps back then away. She watches him go without breaking eye contact. It is only when he has disappeared down the hallway and out of her sight that she turns to the woman in front of her. 

Large, limpid brown eyes stare unblinking, too close to a ten year old brimming with gratitude that it makes her snarl. 

“What?” She feels like slapping her, just for the sake of it. “Did you think I would let her die?”

She doesn’t wait for an answer and slips inside the room, coming to stand next to the bed. 

Letting Emma break the curse would have been disastrous. Everybody might be cursed with false memories, but she thinks not one of them would thank her for the truth. She cannot imagine Snow White folding laundry and chatting amiably with her daughter, glittering thongs and nipple tassels in their hands. Emma would have hated her, would have felt betrayed not only by the decades old feud that she had fuelled, but by the fact she had knowingly slept with her, fostered feelings in her with her.

No. Regina squares her shoulders and takes a breath. Her feelings for Emma were and must always remain temporary, fleeting, a thing to pass the time and not treasured. She does not need them, she does not want them; she cannot. 

And Henry… 

Henry hates her now, but that is no different than if his belief had been confirmed. 

“What did you do?” He’d practically screamed at her when he’d first found out. “This is your fault! You did this!”

She wonders if he’ll ever understand how much she hadn’t wanted to, but for the sake of him, for her, for them, for all of them…

Her finger finds itself in an unruly tress of blonde curls and she lets the softness of it slide over her skin as she trails a fingernail over Emma’s forehead and tucks the lot behind her ear. There is no response. She does not expect a response.

But her chest clenches when there is no fluttering of eyelashes, as if Emma were merely sleeping and needs to be woken. No half sleepy mumble of incoherent words. That mouth will never smile again, nor will the eyes shine at her. 

It’s better like this, of course, but it’s so much worse. 

***

A month later and things have settled into a stasis so smothering she wants to scream with it. 

The townspeople have regressed, time is a fleeting, wavering thing, and the memory of living Emma is fading into a blurry history that means little. Emma in a coma is a town wide reality that nobody questions. Mary Margaret is merely a teacher, with no gumption. David Nolan works in a shelter, remaining loyally married to Kathryn. 

And Regina…

Remains one of only two people that know the truth. 

Henry has not only read the stories, he has heard first hand Mary Margaret’s tale of that afternoon, of Emma eating the pastry. He’s not a fool and he’s not forgiving, but he is still only ten and he seethes at her in their lonely, lonely house that was full of life for a brief time. 

The tapping of a cane, distinct and unpleasant across the hospital tile, interrupts her train of thought. 

“I’m almost surprised to find you here, Madam Mayor.”

Regina’s lip curls up into a sneer. 

“Where else would I be?”

Gold trains his face into a moue of concern, as false and simpering as his town persona. 

“Why, I would think the town hall, presiding as Mayor. You are still Mayor, are you not?” His expression, underneath the banal sympathy and concern, is knowing and gleeful. “Or have you given that up for something a little more…”

She watches his eyes trail over the still form on the bed between them. 

“… stately?”

The way his tongue lilts over the word throws her back decades and lands ago, to standing in a shadowed chamber hidden by heavy curtains that blocked out the sun, dust mites floating valiantly in whatever light could stream through, her back ramrod straight as the corset that bound it, her eyes closed to the temptation of his voice. 

“Of course I’m still the mayor.” She replies with a calm she does not feel. “Any meeting and important duties are arranged for mornings and I take any paperwork with me in the afternoons. Are you having a municipal problem? I’m sure if you call Rose, she’ll schedule an appointment as early as possible.”

Delight glimmers far back in his eyes. 

“Oh no, dear, nothing as urgent as that.” He sighs, deeply and dramatically, before looking back down to the bed. “Such a tragedy, this one. She had so much potential.”

The meaning of that one word has so much weight between them that she feels air tighten in her throat. Almost as hard as the tightening of his knuckles over the head of his cane, if the whiteness straining against the skin is any clue to go by. 

“This sort of thing is always tragic.”

Her tongue skips over the words automatically. 

His expression flickers for a moment, a second too close to angry and threatening, before smoothing out again. 

“Oh, but Ms Swan especially so.” When he looks at her again, his eyes are pointed and she feels all of eighteen again, wilting against his experience and power and her helplessness. “It would be very unfortunate if she were to remain like this, don’t you think?”

She doesn’t give him the luxury of a reply. 

“For all of us.” He continues. “But, I think, especially you. In more ways than one.”

Her eyes narrow. She is no stranger to threats from this man, veiled or not, but the vital question is how much he knows and exactly what he’s talking about. 

Make that possibly three people who know the truth. 

***

“Why are you here?”

There is so much venom in his little body that Regina sometimes cannot marry the boy standing in the doorway to the little cherub who used to grin gummy smiles at her. It does not matter which word she hears or imagines the stress on; it all amounts to the same thing. 

In Henry’s mind, she has no right to be in this room, to sit by this bedside, to stroke soft heated patterns over a bare arm. 

“Henry…”

The reserves she has have dwindled down to nothing. There is no energy left; not to fight not to lie not to protest the bitterness with which he speaks to her. Nothing feels right anymore and, as usual, she is the one to blame. 

“You should leave.” He steps into the room with the assuredness of someone who knows they belong, heaving his school bag from his shoulders to the floor near a second chair. “I’m going to read to Emma.”

There was a time, not too long ago, where Regina would not have paused to inhale before correcting him on his attitude, to remind him who the parent was. But she doesn’t do any of that, barely even thinks to. At the sight of the all too familiar and awful, terrible book he pulls from his bag, her head falls down to the mattress, forehead pillowed by the soft wool atop it, and the welcome, too familiar and much too alien weight of Emma’s arm leaning against the top of her head. 

“You know what that is, right?”

It’s a challenge, she can hear it, in tones all too familiar in her life, but sounding so strange coming from her son. 

“That’s Emma’s baby blanket.” He continues with a pointedness that borders on cruelty. If he had such tendencies in him, it would have been, but no matter how angry, how bitter he gets with her, she can still see the goodness in him, the belief shining in his eyes. “The one Snow White wrapped her in to save her from you.”

Regina sighs. 

“I know.”

She does not realise her words, nor the magnitude of them, until she hears his gasp. 

Instantly she’s awake and alert, back straightening, head lifting, eyes already wide and ready to plead. Even as she knows, brain telling her, shouting at her, that her overreaction will do nothing but cement the confirmation she just handed him, Regina cannot stop herself. 

“Henry.” It’s like a plea, voice shaking. “Henry, no… no.”

He backs away from her, each step echoing in her chest. 

“It’s true.” She watches it like slow motion, the slackening of his face, the way his arms drop and the book slides to the floor with a thump. “It’s all true.”

Regina stands, one hand on Emma’s arm and one reaching out. 

He is, he always has been, too smart for his own good. Her boy, her brilliant, inquisitive, determined boy, whose brain never stops puzzling things out. She watches his eyes flicker back and forth, not seeing the things in front of him, but piecing together bits of his memory. 

“You… you invited her into our house.” She expects anger, she expects recrimination and bitterness and everything he has hurled at her in the last year. She does not know how to read this blank query, this subtle, subdued, monotone. “You laughed with her, you…”

The instant his eyes narrow and focus on hers, she knows. 

“You fell for her!”

She expects anger. She expects recrimination. She expects disgust for the new information he has gleaned. 

She does not expect excitement. 

“Kiss her!”

Her jaw falls open. That was the last thing she expected, though honestly she should have been surprised. 

“I am hardly going to accost an unconscious woman, Henry!”

“She’s not unconscious!” He has forgotten his fear of her in his enthusiasm, rushing forward. “She’s cursed! You just need to break it.”

He is brilliant and intelligent and, still, only ten. Everything is black and white, everything is a simple yes or no. There is no muddy, murky middle ground in his eyes. There is goodness and then there is her. This is the way he sees. It is the way he thinks. 

She does not have the words to tell him that like does not always equal love; that love, even true love, can sour and wilt easily with a well-aimed word or two. That what she had with Emma, if it was ever anything more than what it began as, surely is gone. Surely died the moment she threw Emma out of the house with those horribly, awful, cruel words and then… 

The turnover. 

No. Regina’s love has never been true. It wasn’t for Daniel, kissing his quickly cooling body with a desperation that would never be answered. There is no way her twisted, broken, hurtful kind of love is true in any way. 

Her shoulders drop and she meets his eager, expectant eyes, knowing that her words will drain the light out of them. 

“No, Henry. It doesn’t work like that.”

Then she leaves, just as he had ordered her, walking out of the hospital room, out of the hospital and into the crisp fresh daylight without looking back. 

***

He doesn’t come home. 

She is not surprised. 

Her phone rings and she is not surprised to see the name _Blanchard_ glare at her from the screen. 

_Regina_ , pants the airy, cautious, worried voice of the woman she least wants to hear on her voicemail. _I mean, uh, Mayor Mills. Henry is here, I didn’t want you to worry, he… uh… he doesn’t want to go home. I mean, if you want, I can certainly bring him, but he’s very upset and I think…_

She presses the delete button without listening to the end. 

He’s going to tell her, tell them. Or… he’s not going to tell them. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know and the more she thinks about it, the less her brain makes sense. There is nothing to do, but wait. Wait… 

Wait for the mob with pitchforks. 

Wait for the heavy handed knock on her door. 

Wait for Henry to walk in with sullen, angry, disappointed eyes. 

Wait for a miracle, for Emma to walk in and smile at her again. 

Wait for the loud, doomsday sound of wedding bells against the turret of a cold, stone castle. 

Wait for the hot, hard clench of lungs as magic wraps around her torso and squeezes apologies out of her mouth. 

Wait, apparently, for Dr Whale’s name to flash across the screen of her phone. 

Regina frowns in confusion and presses accept, stomach dropping with acid like anticipation. 

“What’s wrong?” She doesn’t waste time with pleasantries or formalities. “What happened to Emma?”

He is nervous and weak and stuttering and she hates him for it, but he is not urgent, nor is he full of water weak sympathy taught to him in the fake memory of an afterthought class in medical school. How to Impart Bad News to Patients’ Family and Friends 101. 

“There’s a bit of a situation.” He manages to tell her. “In Emma’s room and, as her contact, I figured you should know.”

Air hisses out of her nostrils and she counts to ten in her head. 

“What kind of a problem?”

***

The problem, it seems, is her son dragging random residents into Emma’s room and trying to convince them to kiss the comatose woman in the bed. Well, random is most likely not the right word, Regina thinks as she looks at both David Nolan and Mary Margaret Blanchard giving her wary, apologetic glances. 

“I didn’t do it!” David Nolan hisses, the desperation in his self-defence is almost comical. “If I’d known he’d wanted me to…”

He waves his hand in a futile little gesture in front of him, completely at a loss to describe the situation before him. Mary Margaret reaches out and takes hold of his hand, stopping the gesticulation in its tracks, and letting out a soft, soothing little hum. 

Regina raises her eyebrow. 

Well, that’s new. 

“Of course we didn’t know.” Mary Margaret rushes to continue. “I mean, he was very upset and then he said he wanted to visit… so I thought, maybe, if he could see her… but then… I know he thinks I’m Snow White and she’s my daughter, but…”

“She is your daughter!”

They all turn as one to the small figure sitting sullenly in the chair to the side. 

“Henry.” It’s ten years of instinct all in one vocal range, low enough to resister, to have him slump back down again. “Enough.”

“Just one kiss.” The words are mumbled, low, underneath his breath, but they travel to the little group anyway. “It’s not like…”

Regina sighs. 

“No one is assaulting the comatose woman in the bed, Henry!”

They stare at each other and she is not quite sure what is heavier; the weight of his glare or the silence in the room. 

“Please.” Her voice sounds controlled, she's not really sure how. “Leave me alone with my son.”

Mary Margaret and David Nolan file out of the room and, she's suddenly very sure, wherever they are going they are going together and she really, really needs to keep an eye on that. 

Henry eyes her warily as they both come to settle near the bed. Emma between them like a barrier. She watches him, her son, as he reaches out to pick up an unresponsive hand. The look on his face is heartbreaking and she wishes, as much as she has ever wished before, that Emma would wake up then, would blink her eyes open and look at him. No matter what happened to her, Regina wants that expression off his face. 

“What's it like?

His eyes are large and curious and, hidden far down below, afraid. 

Henry is scared and lost and confused and angry and unable to cope with any of it. 

“What is what like?”

Their conversation is awkward and stilted, neither of them sure of their footing in this new territory of pure, complete honesty. 

“Being like this.” He lifts Emma's hand to illustrate his meaning. “Asleep in the curse?”

Her mouth is dry. 

“Uhh.” Filler words taste strange on her tongue, bred out of her at such an early age as they were, her brain stalling for time. “Unpleasant.”

His nose crinkles. 

“She's not just asleep, is she?”

She doesn't want to do this, she doesn't want to answer him, doesn't want to think about Emma alone... not... 

“No.” 

It was a Tuesday one afternoon when Emma had turned her head against the pillow and looked Regina in the eye, smiling at her, and sighed. A happy, contented sound slipping out of the happy, contented lips, a soft, warm expression. 

She doesn't think she will forget the sparkle in Emma's eyes that day. 

Regina hangs her head. 

“It's a curse, it's meant to punish.” Emma, who was innocent and trusting and full of warmth. “A never ending barrage of your own regrets and fears keeping you company.”

They fall back into silence, she guesses that they're both thinking of all the possibilities of Emma's regrets. Henry's not stupid, he knows parts of Emma's history and may even know more than Regina. She knows the briefest of outlines, from stilted conversations with Emma where the woman had glossed over details and changed the topic quickly and from the file Sydney had dug up, presenting to her like a puppy expecting a treat. 

“How do we wake her up?”

Underneath the frailty of his question, she hears the sliver of coldness, that challenge asking her whether she even wants to, if she is brave enough to wake the sleeping saviour, the woman from her bedsheets she had poisoned without apology. 

“It's a powerful curse.” It's an explanation, but a poor one, she can already see the frustration growing in his eyes. “Only one thing has been able to break magic this str...”

Her voice dwindles down to nothing, her eyes wide, and Regina's brain is thinking so fast she forgets to speak or even consider the ever observant, too brilliant boy watching her. 

“Mom?”

She looks at him then, her son, ten years old, larger and older and stronger than she ever expected the little bundle to be when he was first placed into her arms. Regina is terrified. Terrified of losing him, of the future, of the awfulness of never hearing Emma laugh again if she never wakes up and the certainty of hearing her hatred if she does. 

It's all going to come crashing down around her. 

Regina breathes in. 

“I need you to do me a favour.”

***

Light pools out ahead of the car in two streams of murky yellow. 

Regina's jaw is clenched as tight as the knuckles that grip the steering wheel. 

If there were any justice, it would be raining to suit her mood. But the night is calm and clear around her, dark and eerie with trees sliding by, creating a gloom to the forest that passes outside her window. 

The silence is heavy, unbroken by the radio she turned off, the sounds and voices driving her nerves too high to truly pull this off. 

Henry is at home, she would like to think sleeping, but he has never truly been one for following rules when she is not there to enforce them and, this night above all, he has more than enough reason to be wakeful. Graham is most likely sitting in her office, wondering why his presence was suddenly requested to babysit. 

Why Regina has fled for an undisclosed amount of time. 

The wheels roll over the road, relentless, and Regina breathes in as the town line comes into sight. 

She has left the town before, one of very few who can, there is no discernible reason she should fear it. But there is a heightened sense of urgency tonight. 

Nobody questioned her presence in the hospital, she is far from a rare sight there these days, and she'd slipped into Emma's room easily. Regina wishes things had turned out differently, that she had the strength to see things through without taking the easy way out. She'd run her fingers through Emma's hair, letting herself feel the woman for what might be the last time, and leant down to kiss her forehead. 

A part of her, a part she'd tried so hard to bury, to obliterate, a part that always managed to hurt her in the end, had hoped. A slight pleading that it would work. Nothing had happened, of course, no flashes of light or magic or happiness as the curse had been lifted, nothing except the rhythmic rise and fall of Emma's chest to the sound of the machines breathing for her. 

Regina had said goodbye and then pulled the plug. 

It had been a lot harder to leave the hospital undetected after that. 

She feels nothing as she passes the town line, crosses over into a land unfamiliar to her. She thinks there should be something, something to mark the occasion, trumpets or thunder, even a bolt of lightning would be more appropriate than the silence that seems to blanket her very lungs, stealing her breath. 

Regina faces straight ahead and keeps driving. 

Until there is a sudden sound, a soft shuffling of blankets next to her and the sweet, welcome sound of an all too familiar, sleep hazed voice. 

“Regina? What the f...?”


End file.
